Leslie Charteris - Featuring the Saint

"So!" Jacob Einsmann rose from his chair, rubbing his hands gently together. His eyes were fixed upon the girl. "You vould not listen to it vot I say in London, no, you vere so prrroud, but now you yourself to me hof come, aind't it?"

"Aye, laad, we've coom," drawled the Saint.

"So you hof got it vot you vanted, yes, no, aind't it?"

Einsmann turned his head.

"Ach! I remember you."

"And I you," said the Saint comfortably. "In fact, I spent a considerable time on the trip over composing a little song about you, in the form of a nursery rhyme for the instruction of small children, which, with your permission, I will now proceed to sing. It goes like this: " 'Dear Jacob is an unwashed mamser, We like not his effluvium, sir; If we can tread on Jacob's graft, Das wird jja wirklich fabelhaft.'

For that effort in trilingual verse I have already awarded myself the Swaffer Biscuit." Einsmann leered.

"For vonce, Herr Saint, you hof a misdake made."

"Saint?"

The girl spoke, at Simon's shoulder, startled, half incredulous. He smiled round at her.

"That's right, old dear. I am that well-known institution. Is this the Boche you mentioned at the Cri-the bird who got fresh at the Calumet?"

She nodded.

"I didn't know--"

"You weren't meant to," said Simon coolly. "That was just part of the deception. But I guessed it as soon as Lemuel gave me your name."

"You vos clever, Herr Saint," Einsmann said suavely.

"I vos," the Saint admitted modestly. "It only wanted a little putting two and two together. There was that dinner the other day, for instance. Very well staged for my benefit, wasn't it? All that trout-spawn and frog-bladder about your cabarets, and Lemuel warbling about the difficulty of getting English girls abroad. ... I made a good guess at the game then; and I'd have laid anyone ten thousand bucks to a slush nickel, on the spot, that it wouldn't be long before I was asked to ferry over a few fair maidens in Lemuel's machine. I had your graft taped right out days ago, and I don't see that the present variation puts me far wrong. The only real difference is that Francis is reckoning to have to find another aviator to carry through the rest of the contract-aind't it?"

His hand went lazily to his hip pocket; and then something jabbed him sharply in the ribs, and he looked down at a heavy automatic in the hand of the imitation butler, who had not left the room.

"You vill bring your gun out verree slowly," said Einsmann, succulently. "Verree slowly. . . ."

Simon smiled-a slow and Saintly smile. And, as slow as the smile, his hand came into view.

"Do you mind?" he murmured.

He opened the cigarette case, and selected a smoke with care. The butler lowered his gun.

"Let us talk German," said the Saint suddenly, in that language. "I have a few things to say which this girl need not hear."

Einsmann's mouth twisted.

"I shall be interested," he said ironically.

With an unlighted cigarette between his lips, and the cigarette case still open in his hands, Simon looked across at the German. Stella Dornford was behind the Saint; the imitation butler stood a little to one side, his automatic in his hand. "You are a man for whom there is no adequate punishment.

You are a buyer and seller of souls, and your money is earned with more human misery than your insanitary mind can imagine. To attempt to visit some of this misery upon yourself would do little good. The only thing to do is to see that you cease to pollute the earth."

His cold blue eyes seemed to bore into Einsmann's brain, so that the German, in spite of his armed bodyguard, felt a momentary qualm of fear.

"I only came here to make quite sure about you, Jacob Einsmann," said the Saint. "And now I am quite sure. You had better know that I am going to kill you."

He took a step forward, and did not hear the door open behind him.

Einsmann's florid face had gone white, save for the bright patches of colour that burned in either cheek. Then he spoke, in a sudden torrent of hoarse words: "Sol You say you will kill me? But you are wrong. I am not the one who will die to-night. I know you, Herr Saint! Even if Lemuel had not told me, I should still have known enough. You remember Henri Chastel? He was my friend, and you killed him. Ach! You shall not have a quick death, my friend--"

With the Saintly smile still resting blandly on his lips, Simon had closed his cigarette case with a snap while Einsmann talked, and was returning it to his hip pocket. ... He performed the action so quietly and naturally that, coming after the false alarm he had caused when he took it out of the same pocket, this movement of his hand passed almost unnoticed. Nor did it instantly seem strange to the audience when the Saint's hand did not at once return to view. He brought the hand up swiftly behind his back; he had exchanged the cigarette case for a gun, and he nosed the muzzle of the gun through the gap between his left arm and his body.

"You may give my love to Henri," he remarked, and touched the trigger.

He saw Einsmann's face twist horribly, and the German clutched at his stomach before he crumpled where he stood; but Simon only saw these things out of the tail of his eye. He had whipped the gun from under his armpit a second after his first shot; there was no time to fetch it round behind his body into a more convenient firing position, and he loosed his second shot with his forearm lying along the small of his back and the gun aimed out to his left. But the butler's attention had been diverted at the moment when the Saint fired first, and the man's reaction was not quite quick enough. He took the Saint's bullet in the shoulder, and his own shot blew a hole in the carpet.

Then the door slammed shut and Simon turned right round.

The man who had seized Stella Dornford from behind a moment before the Saint's first shot was not armed, and he had not taken a second to perceive the better part of valour. Unhappily for his future, the instinct of self-preservation had been countered by another and equally powerful instinct, and he had tried to compromise with the two. Perhaps he thought that the armed butler could be relied upon.

The speculation is interesting but unprofitable, for the man's mental processes are now beyond the reach of practical investigation. All we know is that at that precise instant of time he was heading down the hall with an unconscious bur den.

And the Saint had wrenched at the handle of the door, and found it locked from the outside. Simon jerked up his gun again, and the report mingled with a splintering crash.

Her jerked the door open and looked up and down the dark hall. At the far end, towards the back of the house, another door was closing-he saw the narrowing strip of brighter light in the gloom. The strip vanished as he raced towards it, and he heard a key turn as he groped for the handle. Again he raised his automatic, and then, instead of the detonation he was expecting, heard only the click of a dud cartridge. He snatched at the sliding jacket, and something jammed. He had no time to find out what it was; he dropped the gun into his pocket, made certain of the position of the keyhole, and stepped back a pace. Then he raised his foot and smashed his heel into the lock with all his strength and weight behind it.

The door sprang open eighteen inches-and crashed into a table that was being brought up to reinforce it. The Saint leaped at the gap, made it, wedged his back against the jamb, and set both hands to the door. With one titanic heave he flung the door wide and sent the table spinning back to the centre of the room.

The girl lay on the floor by the doorway. On the other side of the room, beyond the upturned table, the man who had brought her had opened a drawer in a desk, and he turned with an automatic in his hand.